500 million computers were trashed in the last decade.1.9 million tons of e-waste ended up in landfills in 2005. Only 345 thousand tons of e-waste were recycled in 2005

Landfills are now a permanent rest stop on the information superhighway.

Some critics chalk this growing waste stream to the booming electronics industry and to our “throwaway” culture: Most Americans would rather buy a new computer than fix the one they bought last year, while some electronics, like cell phones, simply cannot be upgraded.

So mountains of unwanted computers, cell phones, televisions and iPods—called e-waste or e-scrap—are beginning to choke landfills across the country. In the process, they’re creating a major environmental problem.

The question of how to properly dispose of this e-waste has become a puzzle to lawmakers, environmental activists and recycling plant owners alike.

In an attempt to solve that puzzle, deconstruction plants, where the technology once held so valuable to us is pulled apart, smashed, stripped, baled and, ultimately, shipped overseas, have begun popping up all over the country.

But these centers are not just inventive new businesses; they are bulwarks against the toxins found in e-waste that pose a threat to the environment. Older monitors—the ones being traded in for sleek new flat screens—are built with the same cathode-ray tubes found in last-generation televisions. Each of these CRTs contains traces of phosphorous, cadmium and mercury, as well as more than four pounds of lead.

When the product is in use, these chemicals are safely sealed away from users. But when the CRTs in discarded monitors are smashed, the lead they contain can leak. If all of our unwanted monitors are just dumped, over a billion pounds of lead will be added to our landfills and left to seep for all eternity into ground water supplies.

To avoid creating mountain ranges of poisonous e-waste, some of our abandoned computers are recycled or shipped to other nations. This exportation of toxic e-waste creates a dangerous flow of busted monitors and dismembered motherboards to the third world, where cash-strapped families burn power cords in their cooking pots to extract the valuable copper—a procedure undertaken with no safety precautions whatsoever.

A study published in November in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology stated that e-waste in China—the resting place of 70 percent of the world’s electronic trash—significantly increased dioxin levels in women and their breast-fed infants. The measured dioxin levels, which have been linked to cancer and serious developmental defects, were at least 25 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit.

So how is the first world taking on the challenge of this hazardous exportation?

Making a Difference

Across the country, multibillion-dollar investments are being made in demanufacturing centers to help stem the rising e-waste tide.

Pulling Computers Apart

They call it “end-of-life electronics.” Sal Massaro, the owner of Computer Reclamation in Tinton Falls, N.J., pays $700 each month in inspection fees and over $8,400 annually for a license from the state to break apart unwanted computers and sell the pieces domestically and abroad. Twice during our visit he made a simple remark: “The state should be paying me for keeping this stuff out of the landfills.”

Take a video tour of Sal Massaro’s e-cycling plant.Intelligent Sorting

Melanie Haga, the founder of Back Thru the Future, an e-waste recycling plant in Ogdensburg, N.J., took us on a tour of her 40,000-square-foot facility. In her warehouse—where everything is meticulously sorted by year, make and model on neatly organized pallets—she has initiated an end-of-life treatment for e-waste that blends reuse and recycling. She calls it “intelligent
sorting.”

FLYP spoke with Melanie Haga at her plant about her idea of “intelligent sorting,” and took a guided tour of the recycling center and data destruction zone. Watch the video to join in.Breaking It All Down

To lessen the eco-impact of e-waste, computers are being deconstructed into their basic components and shipped worldwide.

Heavily reliant on manual labor, the deconstruction process works like an assembly line in reverse, taking a computer and slowly breaking it down into the raw materials from which it was created. The circuit boards, plastic housings and components, screws, clips, small metal parts and monitors are eventually rendered into fiberglass, metal, gold, lead, nickel, mixed resins and plastics.

In our interactive audio graphic, learn the ins and outs of every step in the e-cycling process, from dismantling the whole computer to dealing with the resultant scrap metals and plastics.Taking Action Now

Faced with toxic e-waste, legislatures and computer manufacturers are teaming up to make electronics more eco-friendly.

1. Getting e-waste bills passed

Following statewide reuse laws in Maine, California, Washington and Maryland, New York City is attempting to become the first metro area to require manufacturers to recycle or recover what they sell. The bill covers computers, monitors, televisions and portable digital music players, but due to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initial opposition, will not specify the amount manufacturers are required to recycle.

2. Biodegradable computers

MicroPro, a Dublin-based company, has recently released iameco, the world’s first line of entirely biodegradable computers. With their fast processors, stunningly modern designs and prices starting at a meager $945, they aren’t mere novelty products.

3. Reusing last year’s model

A lot of fossil fuel is consumed in producing every new computer. As a result, according to a report issued by the United Nations University’s Solving the E-Waste Problem program, reusing offers an energy savings of five to 20 times over recycling.

To encourage the reuse of e-waste, organizations like the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia promote dropping off unwanted electronics at designated reuse centers.

4. Companies take up the slack

Apple’s Steve Jobs has vowed to build greener Macs due to challenges from environmental activists, and most major manufacturers now have take-back programs.
Read more: From IBM to Apple to Gateway, find out how each of the major computer companies are trying to take responsibility for e-waste, and design greener computers.Shredding the Data Trail

Many hard drives are permanently embedded with personal data, so tossing your computer in the trash can be a risk. Now, destroying that data has become an enterprising new business.

At Back Thru the Future, a computer recycling plant in Ogdensburg, N.J., there is a caged-off room in the back of the building. This is the domain of Richard Hild, who is employed as the company’s “destruction manager,” a title that pleases him greatly.

As his title suggests, Hild spends the majority of his workweek destroying hard drives, PDAs and cell phones. He gets paid to log electronics that might have retained even the ghostliest traces of data and load them onto a conveyor belt. He then pushes a button, causing the heaps of hardware to be dropped into a shredder from which they emerge as two-inch slices of scrap metal.

This scrap is then sent to a smelter where it is turned into molten mush. Only then will the data be considered truly unrecoverable. In a nod to the ever-growing importance of documentation in data destruction, the process culminates when Back Thru the Future issues its customers an official “Affidavit of Destruction.”

The importance of data destruction is finally coming to the attention of companies and government agencies, thanks in part to studies of the hard drives being done on the growing market for second-hand computer hardware and electronics, as well as the work of advocacy groups, such as the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID).

In an article published in the December 2007 issue of Computerworld, Robert L. Scheier documented the widespread practice of dumpster diving for flash drives. These two-inch plastic devices are easily tossed, lost or stolen and pose a serious risk, as they often contain veritable treasure troves of data that can be recovered by tech-savvy thieves.

There are a myriad ways to “sanitize,” or clean, a hard drive. But according to Hild, until it is completely melted down or shredded beyond all recognition, data can still be recovered.

To further examine how much data can be culled from the average discarded hard drive, Simson L. Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, in a study published in 2003 in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, chronicled a short exploration they undertook into the second-hand hard drive market.

For their research, Garfinkel and Shelat bought 158 hard drives from various used-electronics venues, like eBay. Using not-so-sophisticated techniques, they were able to recover 75 GBs of data—some 71 GBs of uncompressed disk images and 3.7 GBs of compressed files. In their appropriately-titled paper, “Remembrance of Data Passed,” they wrote that the recovered files included corporate memos about personnel issues, a letter to a doctor from the father of a 7-year-old complaining about his child’s cancer treatment, fax templates for a California children’s hospital, love letters and, of course, pornography.

“The casual way that people treat the information that’s on their computer is quite troubling,” said Bob Johnson, executive director of NAID. The main problem is that even when the well intentioned donate their unwanted computers to schools or libraries, there is absolutely no guarantee that the receiver will properly wipe the hard drive completely clean. Often, Johnson explained, they “don’t have the expertise, the acumen or the security needed to do that.”

To confront that issue—and to empower consumers and businesses to take full control of their data trail—it is important to treat e-waste with the same attention that we give paper documents. While most businesses will invest $10 in a shredder for memos and invoices, they are much less likely to properly dispose of those same documents if they are electronic files.

And even if they do send their old hard drives to a “destruction manager” like Hild, Johnson said that consumers need to pay more attention to the vender: “Selecting the right vender is just as important as getting rid of the information.”

To help consumers navigate the information destruction landscape, NAID offers a certification program for e-waste recycling centers. Back Thru the Future has earned a AAA rating, NAID’s highest grade and a distinction it proudly embraces.

The rating of data destruction centers has only recently begun to enter into the minds of legislatures around the country, although the federal Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 does guarantee that credit information will be properly eliminated from discarded corporate drives.

Most state and local governments, though, have been slow in addressing the rest of the data security risks that are becoming more and more prevalent. So far, just 15 states have enacted shredding laws, according to Johnson, and New York only recently passing legislation that will require all data destruction companies to be registered with the state as of Oct. 1, 2008.

According to Johnson, one of the impediments to progress is inter-governmental squabbling over provisions, such as jurisdiction and notification. This indecision has left key questions—such as how to best notify those who would potentially be affected in the event of a security breech—unanswered.

So while Hild records every serial number from every hard drive that he shreds, it’s probably a bit much to ask him to record all of the data on the hard drives as well. After all, there’s a reason his title is destruction manager.